News

Live Web connection version

Web browsers - HTML version formatted for easy reading via an Internet-connected PC with a Web browser. Link (Thanks to Ilkka for preparing this file!)

Real-world unwiring group in Toronto

My novel deals with a group of people setting about to "unwire" Toronto by deploying free WiFi networks across the city. Wireless Toronto is just such a group in real life, and they've just launched their website. Truth is stranger than fiction!

Wireless Toronto is a not-for-profit group dedicated to bringing no-fee wireless Internet access to Toronto. Our aim is to encourage the growth of wireless networking and to build community in interesting and innovative ways.

Video for the novel

Michael Parenti has put together an amazing short video based on Someone Comes to Town. He says, "Lets just say that i can't agree with him more in his framing of the freedom of access debate in a zeitgeist fairy tale of good vs evil remniscent of the science fiction trilogy by C.S. Lewis."

Kirkus Reviews

Fine modern fantasy from up-and-coming SF writer (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, 2003) and happening Web editor (boingboing.net) Doctorow, with the potential to please both SF and mainstream readers.

This chimera of a novel takes a plot with the geek appeal of a Neal Stephenson story and combines it with a touching family tale built out of absurdist elements that could have come from Italo Calvino or Kurt Vonnegut. We first meet Alan in Toronto, after he's made some money running a series of vaguely bohemian enterprises—bookstores, used-clothing stores, etc. He has painstakingly renovated a house in the student district as the perfect setting for writing, but he's distracted by his neighbors, primarily the sadistic punk Krishna, who is immediately hostile, and Krishna's girlfriend, Mimi, an attractive young woman who's revealed to have a set of wings, which Krishna regularly hacks off so that Mimi might pass among us. Both recognize Alan as something other than normal, and in the story's other thread, they're proven right. His mother was a washing machine, his father the mountain in which he grew up. Among his brothers are an island and three nesting-doll-like creatures, all of whom help Alan murder their resentful and dangerous brother David. Alan is further distracted when he meets Kurt, a techno-punk slowly installing wireless access points throughout the city to provide universal free Internet, a scheme that immediately engages Alan, who becomes the co-mastermind. Crisis blossoms when, with Krishna as his Renfrew, decomposing brother David returns to seek revenge, first by murdering the brothers, then targeting Mimi, now with Alan, and Kurt.
More …

Creative Commons and publishing

The Book Standard has a great article on the use of Creative Commons licenses for electronic distribution of commercial print books, and the growing schism between the kinds of publishers and authors who complain about Google and Amazon's services for searching the whole text of books and the kinds of publishers and writers who celebrate it.

"I don't want to condone piracy," says Hayden of Tor Books. "But in general I find it not so much appalling as encouraging. We're the genre that the readers care enough about to be this obsessive about. I want to do something with this, not fight against it."

Doctorow agrees. "Think about the care that goes into pirating a book!" he says. "That person has not done that because he hates the author and wishes to do the author harm, but because he loves the work and loves the author. Calling that person a thief is about the most suicidal thing you can do." And, as Stross points out, "the availability of a free e-book actually undercuts the profitability of pirate paper or electronic editions."

Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, the leading publisher of computer books in America, says his company certainly does encounter piracy, the more so since their work attracts the most technically savvy people in the world. The books of theirs that sell the best are the books that are most often pirated (and the most shoplifted, incidentally), but this doesn't stop those books from selling well. "I'm sure there are people who pass around the links and use the pirate links," says O'Reilly. "But in our experience they're not the people who are likely to buy the books anyway."

Quality Time

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a perfect example of why we shouldn't be trying to stuff books into genres (although I will say this book is definitely InfernoKrusher). This wonderful, loopy, deep, moving story has a mystery, or maybe lots of mysteries (including the mystery of the human condition), there are a couple of romances, (not to mention the love of life and technology) and there are wonderful, intoxicating, flights of fantasy.
More …

Newton Portrait

Newton 2000/2100 -- Ebook file for built-in ebook reader on Apple Message Pad 2000 and 2100 in portrait mode. 1.4MB PKG file. (Thanks to DJ Volkasko for preparing this file!)

eMate

eMate -- Ebook file for built-in ebook reader on Apple eMate 300 in landscape mode. 1.4MB PKG file. (Thanks to DJ Volkasko for preparing this file!)

Newton Classic

Newton Classic -- Ebook file for built-in ebook reader on Apple MessagePads 1x0, 2x00. 1.4MB PKG file. (Thanks to DJ Volkasko for preparing this file!)

Mobile HTML

Crappy phone browsers: Zip archive containing the book as a series of 5k HTML files for crappy phone browsers that can't handle larger files. 332K ZIP Archive (Thanks to Christopher Wimmer for preparing this file!)

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is proudly powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).